Want Way More Likes On Instagram? These Pop-Up Museums Might Do The Trick

The Museum of Ice Cream. The Egg Shop. Museum of Pizza. These titles may sound like oddly-themed museums or extremely generically-named food establishments, but they are not–they’re the setting for your next Instagram post.

For the past several years, the brightly-colored phenomenon known as a pop-up shop has been steadily increasing in prominence and popularity. From the East coast to the West, consumers have been spending their hard earned dollars on tickets to these locations, where visitors fork over twenty or forty (or sixty) bucks for the privilege of taking pictures in the midst of playful, dreamlike scenes.

Hey, don’t roll your eyes.

Last spring New Yorkers could be seen at the Egg Shop, posing among a truck-sized carton of eggs, among other white-and-yellow oddities.

“The theme centers around Ellis the Egg, a newcomer to the city, ‘experiencing difficulties.’ Founder Xu said Ellis’s plight is relatable to everyone and since eggs ‘are so versatile, they can be cute or sexy’ in photos.”

Okay, go ahead and roll your eyes.

Beyond that, some people are saying that the experience itself is not nearly as entertaining as the social media-worthy posts that result from attending these spaces. Susannah Smreker, who recently attended The Happy Place pop-up in Chicago, lamented that

“You see all the photos and you think it would be fun to go. But now that I’ve been to one, I’m not interested in doing another, no matter how cool it looks on Instagram.”

The Happy Place may have lost Susannah’s business, but plenty of other like-hungry fiends are more than eager to patronize these locales–so much so that the founders of the Egg Shop didn’t even have to invest in advertising, because the shop’s 15,000 Instagram followers gave it all the free publicity it needed.

In today’s social media-crazed society, things are all about appearances. It’s easy to talk sh*t, complain that no one sits back to enjoy an experience anymore without taking a picture of it, say that Tinder swipes and Instagram likes have destroyed the foundations of our democracy–but honestly I just really wanna get myself inside that pizza museum. I don’t care what you think.